刘淼8c59c90f8e97a78041b0958286b5a6e49b92522c-liumiao.net2018-05-13T06:30:19Z新四大发明2018-05-13T06:30:19Z2018/xin-si-da-fa-ming刘淼<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">据说，中国的“新四大发明”是高铁、支付宝、网购和共享单车。不管是谁提出的，这个名单都有许多值得商榷之处。</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">如果说是“发明”的话，显然这件东西应该没有在别处出现过，从这个标准来看，只有无桩的共享单车似乎是首先出现在中国的。虽然如此，把它和高铁、支付宝和网购并列并不合适，因为共享单车出现的时间太短，究竟是可行的商业模式或者只是一时的风潮还说不准。其他几样，起码是经过验证的商业模式。</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">然而其他几样，恐怕都说不上是中国的发明。高铁在别的国家早已经有，支付宝则模仿于美国的Paypal，至于网购，国内的电商应该没有比亚马逊更早的。</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">虽然不是率先出现在中国，这几样事物在中国的发展确实都处于世界领先地位：</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">中国的高铁运营线路全世界最长，这也得益于中国幅员辽阔，比中国面积大或是相似的国家都没有高铁。结合技术和成本各方面来看，中国的高铁也超越了日本的新干线和欧洲的高铁技术。说高铁是新时代可以代表中国形象的发明，完全说得过去。</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">中国的在线支付也非常方便，类似于支付宝或是微信这样账户间转账不收手续费的转账工具，世界其他地方并不多见，即使有也不成规模。但如果要把支付宝和高铁并列在一起，说它有多高的技术含量，显然对高铁不公平。支付宝或是微信的成功，也跟国内金融管制宽松有关，它们的出现，资本推动的作用要大过智慧的成果。</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">至于网购，则顶多只能算是支付手段的附庸。如果没有方便快捷地支付手段，将在很大程度上限制在线购物的发展。比起支付手段来说，网购的创新性更低，如果说支付宝、微信的线下扫码支付方式还算有一定来自中国的创新的话，国内的网络购物同国外相比，基本上没有什么创新之处。</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">在我看来，“新四大发明”里面只有高铁这一项是名副其实的，但独木不成林，一般总要拉上一些别的东西凑起来才算数。如果让我说高铁以外的几大发明的话，我的答案会是以下几种：</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start">比特币矿机。比特币是一个接近1000亿美元的产业，而发明比特币矿机的团队大多是中国人，目前世界上销售的虚拟货币挖矿的矿机也大多数来自于中国；<br /></span>
<span class="md_line">在线直播。像快手这样的移动直播平台在国外或许有，但很少有类似的平台可以有如此大的浏览量与活跃度，这样的平台还给许多二三线城市的青年们提供了成为明星的机会。<br /></span>
<span class="md_line md_line_end">除了这两个以外，我一时之间还想象不出第四样发明。不过，由于中国仍然在飞速发展之中，因而很快必然会出现可以与高铁媲美的发明，而不必让支付宝、网购和共享单车忝列其中。你觉得中国还有哪些值得骄傲的新发明？欢迎在评论区写出来。</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">（写于2017年10月）</span>
</p>基于区块链的twitter2018-04-17T12:29:48Z2018/ji-yu-qu-kuai-lian-de-twitter刘淼<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">memo.cash的数据储存于bitcoin cash的区块链上，我的memo.cash地址是：https://memo.cash/profile/132Duw1v16ozfxWDACvL87r2DToD7xcRKi</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">关于memo.cash，可阅读<a class="md_compiled" href="https://www.jianshu.com/p/a24c1a8fe25e">基于BCH的永不删帖的去中心化“微博”</a></span>
</p>再看电影《幸福时光》2018-04-14T06:38:58Z2018/zai-kan-dian-ying-xing-fu-shi-guang刘淼<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_dom_embed md_line_with_image md_line_start"><img class="md_compiled " src="/2018/_image/2018-04-11/Screen Shot 2018-04-14 at 2.21.43 PM.png" alt="" title="" ><br /></span>
<span class="md_line img_before only_img_before md_line_end">《幸福时光》上映于2000年前后，我刚上大学。学校有个BBS，BBS上有个颇活跃的电影板块，我在无意间看到关于这部电影的评论，具体已经记不清写得什么了，大致是对于张艺谋的批评。</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">多年以后再看这部片子，发现它竟然是那么地好，莫言的小说，张艺谋导演，赵本山主演，差不多是一部中国电影可以想象到的最强阵容了。</span>
</p>‘Class Matters’ Review: The American Dream as Nightmare2018-03-31T12:36:47Z2018/-class-matters-review-the-american-dream-as-nightmare刘淼<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_dom_embed md_line_start md_line_end"><em>By Joseph Epstein</em></span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">As Churchill said that “democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others,” so one might say that capitalism is the worst form of economic organization except for all the others. Steve Fraser, author of “Class Matters: The Strange Career of an American Delusion,” would heartily, adamantly, profoundly disagree. Primitive capitalism, mercantile capitalism, extractive capitalism, industrial capitalism, Keynesian capitalism, corporate capitalism, global capitalism, Mr. Fraser has yet to come upon a capitalism he doesn’t despise, or to discover a sin, from disruption of the ecological balance in nature to the destruction of Native American culture to tooth decay, that cannot be lain at its door. “Capitalism: A Disaster for All Seasons,” the title of an article he wrote for the Nation in 2013, nicely encapsulates his view of the matter.</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">Steve Fraser is a radical to the manner—if not quite the manor—born. He grew up in a middle-class family on Long Island in a plush suburb he doesn’t name. His parents, he reports in one of the autobiographical segments dotted throughout his book, were formed by the Depression and became left-wing activists. He himself, as a kid of 18, went off to work as an activist during the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project, helping to register black voters, an act that required courage and which he recounts, alas, too briefly in his new book.</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">Born in 1945, Mr. Fraser was a university student just at the right time for the student rebellion, which he joined and which conferred upon him a ’60s worldview that, I think it fair to say, he has not since essentially abandoned. During his college days he was, he tells us with some pride, arrested for protest activities more than once. He recounts with especial relish how, on one occasion, an apartment he shared with other student activists was raided by the officers of Frank Rizzo, then chief of police and later mayor of Philadelphia and a man prominent in the rogues’ gallery of all right- (that is, left-) thinking people. The apartment was raided for harboring bomb-making materials—planted there, Mr. Fraser claims—ostensibly to blow up the Liberty Bell. But why blow up the Liberty Bell, as some friends said at the time, when it was already cracked?</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">In “Class Matters,” Mr. Fraser continues his lifelong mission to establish that the world is unfair, and nowhere more so than in permitting those who have acquired power to exert it in their own self-interest. The book sets out to debunk what its author thinks to be some of the enduring myths about American democracy. Mr. Fraser describes the commercial interests that commingled with the desire for liberty felt by early American settlers at Plymouth Rock and Jamestown; the capitalist bias implicit in the composition of the U.S. Constitution; and even the sad truth about the hard life of the American cowboy, who turns out, in Mr. Fraser’s reading, to have been a proletarian in the saddle.</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">Mr. Fraser has earlier written books on “The Limousine Liberal: How an Incendiary Image United the Right and Fractured America” (2016) and “The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power” (2015) as well as two books on Wall Street and a book on the labor leader Sidney Hillman. Behind all these works has been their author’s attempt to alert his countrymen to the role big-money capitalism plays in betraying the American dream. The main theme of “Class Matters” is anticipated in Mr. Fraser’s “Limousine Liberal,” in which he writes that “here in the homeland we don’t easily resort to the language of class struggle,” and that Americans “think of class warfare, if they think of it at all, as alien, something they have in Europe or had in Russia—but not here certainly, not in the New World, where classes were providentially banned from the beginning.”</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">As a title “Class Matters” is, I believe, a misnomer. Social class is of course a subtle social construct, with implications and ramifications that have kept sociologists busy for more than a century and given Balzac, Thackeray, Henry James, Edith Wharton and other novelists rich literary material for years before that. Yet the intricate calibrations of class—upper-middle, lower-middle and the rest—are not of the least of interest to Mr. Fraser. Class, for him, is a synonym for power, or want of power, and, in his view, there are two classes, and two classes only: those who have power and those who don’t. “Power Matters” would have been a more accurate if less enticing title for his book. But, then, who doesn’t believe that power matters? Steve Fraser thinks his fellow Americans grossly deluded on the subject, and has written his book to straighten us out.</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">Mr. Fraser notes that many of the original American settlers at Plymouth Rock and Jamestown, were, disappointingly, main chancers, out to clear their old-world debts and make a serious financial score in the new world. Much the same, he holds, can be said about some among the authors and signers of the Constitution at Philadelphia: George Washington was a heavy land speculator, members of the Adams family were bondholders, and others had such extensive financial investments that the Constitution’s system of checks and balances also, in Mr. Fraser’s words, “afforded checks by the powerful against the powerless.” The Constitution, he argues, favored “capital’s liberty to do as it desired,” adding: “The new nation . . . was definitely open for business.”</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">“Class Matters” argues that the intentions of the French creators of the Statue of Liberty were utterly bourgeois. (“To have a horror of the bourgeois,” wrote Jules Renard, “is bourgeois.”) Among Americans the much despised (by Mr. Fraser) robber barons—notably J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Russell Sage, Jay Gould —were reluctant about ponying up for the full cost of the statue. When it finally went up in 1886, Mark Twain thought Lady Liberty looked “too hearty and well-fed.” A century or so later, the musician Lou Reed, mocking as empty words the Emma Lazarus poem inscribed on a bronze plaque at its pedestal—“. . . give me your tired, your poor, /Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free . . .” —called it “the Statue of Bigotry.”</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">In a reversal of McCarthyism, Steve Fraser finds not Communists but the power of capitalism everywhere, making life hell for those without power. Early on, he states his dark case: “Everyday life in every way bears the stigmata of class. Who lives longest and who dies soonest, who goes to jail and who is free, who is healthy and who sickly, who learns and who lives in ignorance, who gets bailed out and who goes under, who pursues happiness and who goes off to fight and die, who lives with rooms to spare and who six to a room, who breathes clean air and drinks clean water and who is poisoned, whose children thrive and whose barely survive, who looks to the future and who lives moment to moment, who is secure and who in peril, who rules and who obeys? Answers to these and other life-and-death questions depend to a very considerable degree on just which niche in the class hierarchy you inhabit. Reports and research studies periodically remind us of these stark realities.”</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">Stark they are, but are they also realities? Is the America so deeply divided between the powerful and the powerless as throughout his book Mr. Fraser avers? Where others find progress, he sees subterfuge. The increased number of African-Americans who over the years have attained to high positions in government bureaucracies or won elective office disappoints him because these individuals “identified with, enjoyed innumerable ties to, and shared the ideological outlook with the state-managed capitalism run by the Democratic Party . . .”</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">Productive in so many ways, America has let Mr. Fraser down by failing to produce a true proletariat, one that would carry on the class struggle that is the true name of his desire. Everywhere the denial of the reality of class, he finds, causes the nation’s oppressed to shy away from such a struggle. What is ultimately needed, he believes, is “dismantling the prevailing hierarchies of power and wealth” and “a major overhaul of the distribution of wealth and power.” He does not describe how this is to come about, but a staunch opposition to the controlling hand of capitalist power would clearly be a beginning.</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">Reading Mr. Fraser, with his confidence in the need for a class struggle and a radical realignment of the distribution of power, I was reminded of my own days in the middle 1960s, when my politics were closer to his now and I was the director of the anti-poverty program in Little Rock, Ark. There I helped to set up legal aid for the poor, hoping they would use it to sue the city, the state, the federal government—the powers that were, wherever they were. I was later saddened to learn the poor used it, instead, chiefly to sue one another: for divorce, the collection of personal debts, spousal support and other distinctly apolitical matters. As Brecht said “First grub, then ethics,” so the poor of Little Rock felt “First settle personal problems, then political empowerment.” Human nature is generally not the revolutionary’s most reliable friend.</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">Now in his mid-70s, Mr. Fraser most likely looks back upon his life as one led in service to the ideal of the emancipation of the underclass. All his days he has been true to the vision of his youth, a vision at whose center has been a loathing of injustice and a longing for equality. If his thus far seems a lost cause, he doubtless is self-assured that it has been a noble one. If the utopia that was meant to be America by its early settlers has failed, my guess is that Mr. Fraser would argue this is no reason to eschew the dream of utopianism generally.</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">And pretty it would be to think so, but for the fact that so many utopias—in modern times notably the Russian and the Chinese and, on a lower level of human slaughter, the Cuban—have failed so disastrously. In the rubble of the tower of Babel, the first of humankind’s utopias, with its architectural plan to reach heaven from earth, the following two-line poem is said to have survived: “Those who in Elysian fields would dwell, / Do but extend the boundaries of hell.”</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">Mr. Fraser might wish to consider having those lines framed and set on a wall in his living room, there for him to contemplate daily.</span>
</p>A Most Successful Failure2018-03-31T12:20:47Z2018/a-most-successful-failure刘淼<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_dom_embed md_line_start md_line_end"><em>By Joseph Epstein</em></span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">‘The true paradises,’ wrote Proust, “are the paradises that we have lost.” F. Scott Fitzgerald would have enthusiastically seconded the motion. In his short life (1896-1940), Fitzgerald had come rather to specialize in lost paradises. His first novel, published when he was 23, was “This Side of Paradise.” The first major biography of Fitzgerald, written by Arthur Mizener, was titled “The Far Side of Paradise.” Now David S. Brown, a historian by training and trade, has written “Paradise Lost,” an excellent study of Fitzgerald that summarizes past scholarship on the novelist and sets out the argument that, in his fiction, he was both a moralist and a social critic working the same vein as Thorstein Veblen, Randolph Bourne and H.L. Mencken —that he was, in other words, a chronicler of the depredations of capitalism gone haywire on American life. Mr. Brown argues that Fitzgerald also joined “Freud, Conrad, Adams, Spengler, [Frederick Jackson] Turner, and Eliot in trying to make sense of the modern age.”</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">F. Scott Fitzgerald is perhaps best known as the chief representative, if not the leading exemplar, of the Jazz Age, that period in American life between the end of World War I and the onset of the Depression in 1929. The tendency has been to think of him as a romantic, a bit of a snob, and a boozer. He was all three, of course, but he was also much more—a vastly talented writer with a gift for imbuing what he wrote with a charm that, when he was at his best, seemed quite magical. His specialty was endowing the wishes and dreams of his characters with an aura of poetry.</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">The critic Edmund Wilson, Fitzgerald’s friend at Princeton, did him no service when, as early as 1922, he wrote that Fitzgerald had “been given imagination without intellectual control of it . . . the desire for beauty without an aesthetic ideal and . . . a gift for expression without very many ideas to express.” Wilson did concede that, for all his faults, Fitzgerald’s fiction “does not commit the unpardonable sin: it does not fail to live.” (The same cannot be said of Wilson’s own attempts at fiction, “I Thought of Daisy” and “Memoirs of Hecate County.”) That much of Fitzgerald’s fiction continues to live, now nearly a century after he wrote it, guarantees his place in American literature, the Nathaniel Hawthorne, as Mr. Brown nicely proposes, of the 20th century.</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">“I didn’t have the two top things: great animal magnetism or money,” Fitzgerald wrote. “I had the two second things, though: good looks and intelligence.” Neither of the latter conduced to grant him his two youthful wishes, which were to play football for Princeton and to prove his courage in World War I. Nature denied him the physique for the first (he was 5-foot-6 and weighed 130 pounds); history denied him the second (soon after he received his commission, the war ended). A second set of wishes—success as a young novelist and marriage to a beautiful and ebullient Southern girl—did come true, though this seems to be a case of the gods first acceding to the wishes of those whom they would destroy.</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">Fitzgerald wrote about his own youthful triumph with his novel “This Side of Paradise” (1920) and about what a mixed blessing it was. “The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter,” he noted in “The Crack-Up” (1936), adding that in his case early success meant “the fulfilled future and the wistful past were mingled in a single gorgeous moment—when life was literally a dream.” Whatever its joys, an early success does not supply the best training for the harder days ahead in later life.</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">As for winning the Southern belle, Zelda Sayre, of Montgomery, Ala., she agreed to marry Fitzgerald only if he could make money from his writing; after his first novel was accepted and proved a commercial success, they married. A writer with more than a proclivity for dissipation and a strong case of Irish flu (also known as alcoholism), Fitzgerald could not have found a worse partner than Zelda. She suffered her first breakdown in 1930 and, though thought neurasthenic, was evidently what is now labeled bipolar.</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">Mr. Brown devotes several judicious pages to the toll that the Fitzgerald marriage, with its infidelities and rivalrousness, took on both parties. “What is our marriage anyway?” Zelda wrote to Scott. “It has been nothing but a long battle ever since I can remember.” Fitzgerald told a friend that “I don’t know whether Zelda and I are real or whether we are characters in one of my novels.” Poor Zelda, in and out of sanitariums, lived on eight years after her husband, only to die of asphyxiation in a fire.</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">Mr. Brown’s book is a useful corrective to the figure of F. Scott Fitzgerald as a hopeless drunk and unrestrained reveler—diving into the fountain at the Plaza and all that—which has been vastly overdone. Fitzgerald had, after all, published three novels before he was 30. He was never less than stalwart in fulfilling his duty. He worked hard to pay off his wife’s costly medical bills and sent their daughter, Scottie, to the best private schools. In the middle 1930s, he set aside his artistic plans to work in Hollywood for the kind of money that allowed him to close the books on his debts.</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">Weak, wavering though Fitzgerald often was, strong character was one of his ideals. “He believed in character,” he wrote about Charlie Wales, the hero of his story “Babylon Revisited.” “He wanted to jump back a whole generation and trust in character again as the eternally valuable element. Everything wore out.” A central aspect of the novelist’s criticism of the 1920s, in which he came to full maturity, is that its gaudy opulence took its toll on character.</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">Fitzgerald also believed in his art, at which he worked with the ardor of the true professional. In his introduction to “The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald” (1951), Malcolm Cowley recounts the multiple revisions that Fitzgerald put his novel “Tender Is the Night” through, discarding great chunks of it as he went along. He kept notebooks in which he recorded observations, descriptions and overheard bits of conversation that might one day be useful for his fiction. His artistic ideal was Joseph Conrad, and he aspired to be the American Conrad. He was more cavalier with his short stories, claiming that a moderate-length story shouldn’t take more than a day to write, a lengthier one three days. He published many of his stories in the Saturday Evening Post, where the fees were impressively high. Between 1920 and 1937, Mr. Brown reports, he published 65 stories there.</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">The regnant American figures of the 1920s were its songwriters: Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Rodgers and Hart. Fitzgerald thought he might well have become a songwriter himself, “but I guess I am too much a moralist at heart and really want to preach at people in some acceptable form, rather than to entertain them.” He was able to get away with his preaching only because he could do so in his fiction subtly, charmingly, and, yes, entertainingly. What Fitzgerald preached was, as Mr. Brown puts it, the “ongoing saga—the one about the man, the generation, and the country that had fallen short.” Notes harking back to a better time play throughout his fiction. One recalls here Nick Carraway’s admiration for his father in “The Great Gatsby.”</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">Fitzgerald remarked that there can never be a good biography of a good novelist because a novelist is so many of the characters he has created. Yet his own most interesting characters turn out to have been portraits or partial projections of himself. Amory Blaine of “This Side of Paradise,” the literary dilettante at Princeton, is fairly closely modeled on the novel’s author. Jay Gatsby’s love for Daisy Buchanan resembles Fitzgerald’s own hopeless youthful love for Ginevra King, the daughter of a vastly wealthy Chicago banker whose money put her well out of his league. At the beginning of “Tender Is the Night,” Dick and Nicole Diver would appear to be loosely based on Gerald and Sara Murphy, the swank couple who made the Riviera fashionable for Americans, but the book ends with the Divers more resembling the Fitzgeralds as their marriage caves in owing to Nicole’s mental illness and Dick’s drinking. In the unfinished novel “The Last Tycoon,” the Hollywood producer Monroe Stahr, is meant to resemble MGM’s Irving Thalberg, the only man said to have understood the “full equation” required for successful movies. The novel turns on a doomed affair, suggesting Fitzgerald, who in his last years carried on a love affair with the gossip columnist Sheilah Graham.</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">What ties these fictional heroes together is that all are failures. Fitzgerald, as is well known, died thinking himself a failure. (His writing was out of fashion, and his final royalty check, as Mr. Brown notes, for the humiliating sum of $13.13.) Yet Fitzgerald had a way, in his writing, of making failure seem not only fascinating but noble. All his heroes, like their author, were romantic dreamers: Gatsby’s dream was to recapture the past, Dick Diver’s to bring the luster of charm to everyone he loved and befriended, Monroe Stahr’s to make art in a Hollywood world where it was held in contempt. Each is doomed to failure; each in his own way is admirable. Success would only have robbed them of their allure.</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">The background to Fitzgerald’s fiction, Mr. Brown avers, is “social breakdown.” By this he means that “the collapse of once dominant classes, values, and taboos had given his work an immediacy that worked on two levels, most obviously as ruminations on topical issues and, more important, as deeper meditations on historical change.” This gives Fitzgerald’s best fiction a weight, a gravity, that it might otherwise not possess. “In Fitzgerald’s writings, rather, we encounter an America unusually thick with fallen heroes, martyrs to a powerful social-mobility mythology,” writes Mr. Brown. “Embedded in these offerings is the disquieting notion that we have drifted far from our inheritance as the children of pioneers to fashion a culture that teaches its young to love too much the privileges and protections of wealth.”</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">Early in his career, Fitzgerald set out the following program as a goal for writers: “An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.” Given the unceasing flow of books by and about him and the fact that, excepting perhaps only J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye,” “The Great Gatsby” must be the most taught book in American classrooms, Fitzgerald accomplished this goal, though at his death in 1940 he could not have known it.</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">Mr. Brown shares with Fitzgerald himself the view that “Tender Is the Night” was his best novel, “Gatsby” his second best. The latter Fitzgerald thought “a kind of tour de force and the other a confession of faith” and went on to compare “Gatsby” to a sonnet and “Tender” to an epic. Having recently reread both novels, I would agree that “Tender Is the Night” is a work on a larger canvas, with many more characters and touching on more themes. Yet it also contains a larger than fair share of longueurs, patches of egregious overwriting and a less than compelling plot, if plot it may be said to have at all. “The Great Gatsby,” on the other hand, is without a false note, on a grand theme, penetrating in its observations and exquisitely plotted—in all as nearly perfect a novel as American literature provides.</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">Before his death, bemoaning the unjust neglect of his writing, Fitzgerald noted that “even now there is little published in American fiction that doesn’t slightly bear my stamp—in a small way I was an original.” An original he indubitably was, and one of the splendid services rendered by Mr. Brown is to have convincingly made the case that F. Scott Fitzgerald was an original in a way much grander than he himself realized.</span>
</p>Fall of an Empire Through a Family’s Eyes2018-03-31T12:14:26Z2018/fall-of-an-empire-through-a-family-s-eyes刘淼<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_dom_embed md_line_start md_line_end"><em>By Joseph Epstein</em></span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">The best novels, with only a small number of notable exceptions—“Don Quixote,” “In Search of Lost Time,” “Ulysses”—have been family novels. “War and Peace,” “Anna Karenina,” “The Brothers Karamazov,” “My Antonia,” “The Brothers Ashkenazi,” “Buddenbrooks,” “Joseph and His Brothers,” family novels all, provide a deeper pleasure than does most other fiction. Family, as William Shakespeare (author of “King Lear,” “Hamlet” and “Macbeth”) would have been the first to tell you, is the great literary subject. In this pantheon of great family novels, though it is not so well known as those I’ve just mentioned, is “The Radetzky March” (1932), a novel written in German by Joseph Roth (1894-1939), a Galician Jew on whose tombstone in France are engraved the words “Ecrivain Autrichien,” Austrian Writer.</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">Michael Hofmann, Joseph Roth’s best translator and most perceptive critic, has called “The Radetzky March” “a work that seems to be done in oils.” That interesting remark suggests both the splendor of Roth’s novel and its feeling of permanence as a work of literature built to last. The reason is to be found not only in Roth’s literary craftsmanship, which is consummate, or in the fascination exerted by his characters, which are without exception artfully drawn, but in the grandeur of the novel’s theme. That theme is the gradual fall and ultimate demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">“The Radetzky March” takes its title from Johann Strauss Sr. ’s famous musical composition, which Roth called “the Marseillaise of conservatism.” The novel is the chronicle of three male generations of the Trottas, a Slovenian peasant family that is ennobled when at the battle of Solferino, in 1859, its first-generation figure, the young lieutenant Trotta, is wounded, almost by accident, by a bullet intended for Emperor Franz Joseph. The emperor would eventually reign over the Austro-Hungarian Empire for 68 years, from 1848 to his death in 1916.</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">Roth’s novel is a valediction for the political configuration of an empire that he, a far from uncritical intellectual, came more and more to admire, toward the end of his life calling himself a monarchist. The Austro-Hungarian Empire, extending from the border of Russia to those of Serbia, Italy, Germany, Romania and the Adriatic Sea, was an astonishing multinational state, a confederation comprising Bohemians, Poles, Moravians, Slavians, Croatians, Transylvanians and others. Within the Dual Monarchy, as the Austro-Hungarian Empire was also called, a true spirit of internationalism reigned: Within it one passed borders without passports, did business without tariff or taxation. Under this arrangement the Emperor Franz Joseph was like unto a god. Simple people kept his photograph on their walls next to that of Jesus Christ.</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">In “The Radetzky March” the collapse of the Empire is reflected in the fate and changed character of the Von Trottas over three generations: from that of the rugged military virtues of “the hero of Solferino,” as the textbooks call the first Trotta, to the rigidity of his bureaucratic son (a district commissioner in Moravia), to the aimlessness of the grandson, Carl Joseph, who will die a senseless death in World War I. It is called World War, Roth remarked, because it changed “the whole world.” That war, along with the Russian Revolution and the Treaty of Versailles, put paid to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">A grand theme can emerge in fiction only if joined to the richness of the highest art. This Roth supplies in abundance. His artistic power extends from commanding sweeping narrative to filling in arresting detail. The most minor character is often sprung to life with a single such detail, like one Captain Lorenz, who “was the father of three children, and the husband of a disappointed wife.” The Polish Count Chojnicki is “forty years old but of no discernible age.”</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">Roth captures friendships begun late in life, sexual infatuations contracted early in life. At one point midway in his novel, he writes: “So curious, changeable, and knotted is the human soul.” He unknots it throughout the pages of “The Radetzky March,” convincingly setting out the thoughts of characters of great intellectual penetration as well as those, like the last of the Von Trottas, “not overly endowed with imagination.” Roth’s range of characters is dazzling. An entire chapter in “The Radetzky March” is given over to the thoughts of Emperor Franz Joseph, alone in his bed chamber, sensing the end of his empire. Then there are the Jews of the provincial town of Jagers on the Russian border, who by some freak of nature had red hair. “Their beards were like conflagrations.”</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">In a life of only 44 years, Joseph Roth wrote 15 novels and a vast quantity of superior journalism. A spendthrift with heavy expenses—his wife, thought to be schizophrenic and later to be murdered under Hitler’s euthanasia program, spent much of her adult life in insane asylums—he worked under the lash of financial pressure all his days. Nothing he wrote was negligible, trivial. But only in “The Radetzky March” did all his impressive powers come fully into play. In that novel he left the most convincing quotidian account we have of life under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, established his literary heritage, and left succeeding generations an imperishable masterpiece.</span>
</p>1914年以来，美国最值得读的作者前三位2018-03-22T12:54:34Z2018/1914nian-yi-lai-mei-guo-zui-zhi-de-du-de-zuo-zhe-qian-san-wei刘淼<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">要推荐美国的作家，对我来说并不是一件容易的事，因为我向来不掩饰自己对于美国的讨厌。萧伯纳曾经说，“我越说美国人的坏话，他们越喜欢我”（Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them.）我说美国的坏话，并不像萧伯纳那样有功利心，只是实话实说罢了。</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">美国人给我的印象之一，恰恰是他们缺乏文化，我想这也与他们的娱乐业发达有关。如果娱乐方式太多的话，人们多数不愿意选择读书，再加上许多国家或是民族并没有“万般皆下品，惟有读书高”这样的传统认识。</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">所以约瑟夫·爱泼斯坦这样的作家在美国显得格格不入，他是一位百科全书式的作家，也就是差不多任何话题都能从他的文章中找到答案。尽管爱泼斯坦先生的书出了一本又一本，但似乎很少有畅销之作，他的名字不仅在中国少为人知，就算在美国应该也很少有人知道。关于爱泼斯坦，我另外写过一篇文章<a class="md_compiled" href="https://www.jianshu.com/p/e8337c0a6ec6">介绍</a>，还翻译过他两篇小短文（<a class="md_compiled" href="https://www.jianshu.com/p/e8337c0a6ec6">一位巧舌如簧骗子的画像</a>，<a class="md_compiled" href="https://www.jianshu.com/p/00e39f05639a">小钱</a>）。</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">推荐完约瑟夫·爱泼斯坦之后，这项任务的难度陡然增加。我想推荐菲茨杰拉德，查了一下才发现他出生于十九世纪末，虽然他可以排进有史以来的美国作家前三。在推荐第二位美国作家时，我准备打个擦边球，要推荐的作家叫董鼎山。</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">董鼎山是翻译家董乐山的哥哥，很早就加入了美国籍，因而说是美国作家也没错。之所以推荐董鼎山，是因为他在上世纪八十年代向国内介绍了大量的美国文学作品，可以说是中国人了解美国文学的一扇窗户，对美国作家感兴趣的，大可以看董鼎山的书评作品，按图索骥即可。</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">最后，我要推荐一位小说家雷·布拉德伯里，他是《华氏451》和《火星人年表》的作者，也许是阅读量有限的缘故，我一直有种美国作家强于娱乐性或政治正确而缺乏人文关怀的偏见，但雷·布拉德伯里并非这样的作家，这也使得他和约瑟夫·爱泼斯坦一样，不那么像一位美国作家。</span>
</p>
<h2 id="toc_0" class="h16"></h2>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">本文回答<a class="md_compiled" href="https://www.jianshu.com/p/aa61c7f99230">王茯苓的问题</a>。</span>
</p>对中国文学现状的看法2018-03-21T14:56:28Z2018/dui-zhong-guo-wen-xue-xian-zhuang-de-kan-fa刘淼<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">大体上，中国文学界可以分为以下几大派：体制派、市场派和独立派。</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">体制派目前占了大多数，比如说，许多作家是作协的签约作家，或者在文联、作协的相关机构里任职，同时从事文学创作，从国家机构领工资。除了签约作家以外，作协也有普通成员，虽然作协成员只是一种身份而不是职业，本身并不能为作者带来无缘无故的收入，但由于国内的许多文学杂志隶属于文联或者作协管理，因此，身为作协成员相比其他人有更多的投稿机会，这一点是无法否认的。虽然国内有各种各样的协会，但我想还没有那种协会全国之间的交流，可以超过作协成员，大概在于，即是没有互联网，作家们也已经早已因为需要投稿的缘故开始了通信交流。这种紧密的交流延续至今，也加剧了体制文学派的圈子化。</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">由国家承担文学工作者的各项费用，这样的制度在全世界也不算多见。对于体制内的许多作家来说，可以创作真正为广大群众喜闻乐见的作品，而无须讨好市场，这大概也正是这种制度的意义所在。但随着市场化的开展，一些体制派的作家也难免受到质疑，因为他们的作品不接受市场的检验，而只能由圈内人士互相欣赏。</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">随着市场经济的开放，国内也出现了市场派的作家。在海外，这样的作家占据了绝大多数。市场派作家的作品深受市场欢迎，非常好卖，但作者可能并不属于任何一个作协，甚至不被文学界所认可。但是无所谓，因为他们的作品可以大卖，本身已经可以从经济上给作者带来丰厚的收入。尽管体制派作家与市场派作家形同陌路，但现在也有越来越多的交流。一些体制内作家的作品，可能很被市场认可，比如张艺谋的电影许多改编自体制内作家的作品；一些市场作家也在成名之后加入作协，成为体制的一份子。更有金庸这样的市场派作家，被北大教授写入文学史，当年颇引起了一番争议。</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">除了体制派作家和市场派作家，还有很小一部分作家是独立派，他们并不属于体制，却也不愿意讨好市场，创作难以被大众所接受的文学作品。对于这一类作家，我觉得他们更像是先锋艺术家，只是采取了文字作为创作的媒介。</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">由于历史的原因，在很长一段时间里，中国没有金庸古龙或是琼瑶这样的市场派作家，改革开放以后，市场派作家逐渐涌现，但与别的行业相比，作家们所能获得的收入并不算太多，因而很多有能力的作家并没有选择这种职业。这种情况随着经济的发展有所改观，有赖于电影和电视业的发展，市场派的作家越来越能够获得超额的回报，同时也带动了整个文学市场的行情，体制内作家的作品也可以卖出不错的价钱。</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_start md_line_end">当文学只是少数人的特权的时候，身处其中的人往往会将它神圣化。可以预见的是，随着经济的发展，越来越多有能力的人会投入到文学的事业中来，而文学也不再像以往那样神圣化，写作也会成为同其他行业一样的谋生之道。</span>
</p>2018-03-172018-03-16T16:00:00Z2018/2018-03-17刘淼<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_dom_embed md_line_with_image md_line_start md_line_end"><img class="md_compiled " src="/_image/2018-03-17/6533828001435841929.jpg" alt="" title="" ></span>
</p>Comedy Is Not Pretty, and Nowadays It Isn’t Even Funny2018-03-11T13:22:36Z2018/comedy-is-not-pretty-and-nowadays-it-isn-t-even-funny刘淼<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line md_line_dom_embed"><em>By Joseph Epstein</em></span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line">I found myself seated at my computer last month, watching on YouTube the comedian Bill Maher talk about Donald Trump’s marriage. If you don’t share Mr. Maher’s politics, you are likely to find him an odious, even loathsome character, for he doesn’t really exist outside politics. His standard tone is mockery, his modus operandi to lacerate his targets with obscenities, flash a nervous smile, and then bask in applause from his audience.</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line">I was watching Mr. Maher on YouTube to see how far he would go on the subject of the Trump marriage. Would he attack the Trumps’ 11-year-old son, or perhaps attack the family for not having a dog? No surprise, he brought up the allegations of sexual harassment against Mr. Trump. Stormy Daniels was mentioned. His final punch line was that Melania Trump hadn’t accompanied her husband to Davos, Switzerland, because she had spent the day having to “lay a wreath on the tomb of the unknown trophy wife.”</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line">Donald Trump has been a great boon to late-night talk-show hosts. His baroque hairdo, his hyperbole, his general extravagance, his unabashed egotism—all these things and more are in the wheelhouse of today’s liberal comedians. Without him, Bill Maher and Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Meyers would be practically out of business. Jon Stewart must wake each morning filled with regret for his wretched timing at retiring just as Mr. Trump came into office.</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line">Yet to have taken what I think of as the Trumpian option in their comedy has rendered these comedians charmless while strikingly limiting their audiences to those who share their politics. I recently wrote a book on the subject of charm, in preparation for which I asked a great many people to name five persons in public life they thought charming. No one could do it. In a political time as divisive as ours, a public figure loses roughly half his following—and hence his charm—just as soon as he announces his politics. For an entertainer to do so is perhaps even more hazardous.</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line">That the late-night talk-show hosts are ready to give up a large share of the audience to indulge their politics is something new in American comedy. Whatever Jack Benny, the Marx Brothers, Milton Berle, Joan Rivers or Johnny Carson might have thought about what was happening in Washington, they wisely kept it to themselves. When Charlie Chaplin was revealed as a Communist fellow-traveler in the late 1930s it hurt his reputation, though he never allowed his politics directly to influence his art. On the other side, when Bob Hope found himself, because of his support for the Vietnam War, aligned with Richard Nixon, many of his most steadfast fans deserted him. The lesson, one should have thought, is that comedy and politics don’t mix.</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line">Unless, that is, the comedy is done with consummate subtlety. Mort Sahl, whom Steve Allen called “the only real political philosopher we have in modern comedy,” was one of the few with the talent to pull it off. I recall an instance when he appeared on the Johnny Carson show. Carson asked Mr. Sahl how he was. Not so good, the comedian answered. He had recently received a letter from the NAACP that admonished him, as a good liberal, for not having a black comedian in his act. Acknowledging his error, Mr. Sahl said he had hired a brilliant young black comic to work with him. Then he paused, looked down at his watch, and said, “He should have been here by now.” It took the audience fully 15 seconds to get the joke, when ripples, then roars of laughter followed.</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line">Yet even Mr. Sahl lost ground when he became caught up, obsessed really, with conspiracy theories about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and he spent years trying to regain, which he never quite did, his former cachet as the most brilliant of our comics. Clearly, Americans prefer that comedians keep their distance from political involvement.</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line">Mr. Sahl, now in his 90s, still regularly appears before small audiences at a theater in California and occasionally sends out political tweets. Alas, none of this has the sharpness of Mort Sahl in his prime—but neither are his remarks about Donald Trump as coarse as the cheap-shot humor of our contemporary late-night hosts.</span>
</p>
<p class="md_block">
<span class="md_line">Enough people must share the views of these hosts to keep the careers of Maher, Colbert, Kimmel &amp; Co. afloat, which is to say to keep their ratings high enough to be commercially viable. Yet these insufficiently funny comedians, with their crude political humor, do little more than add to the sad divisiveness that is rending the country. Something, surely, has been lost if one can no longer turn to comedy as a relief from the general woes of life and the greater farce that has for some years now been playing out in our everyday politics.</span>
</p>